Category: Work stuff

As soon as you send your exposure meters out for calibration, there are at least 2 pieces of new x-ray equipment that need acceptance testing the next week.

A few weeks ago I received word that a small research project proposal that I submitted had gotten funding approval from the sponsoring company. Terrific! My first research grant! This is a big event for me. Most of the grant funds will be used to purchase another phantom, but first there’s paperwork to be filled out. And I’ll have to navigate the hospital’s research and grant administration process. Fine, no problem. There are plenty of people around here with lots of experience in this kind of thing.
First snag I encounter is that I learn is that the hospital takes 25% off the top for overhead. Ok, nobody told me about that when I was coming up with a budget for my proposal so I might have to go back and say I’ll need more money. But the people helping me with this tell me that I can probably get an exemption from this overhead charge. Good.
Then, I discover that because I don’t have a faculty appointment I can’t be the principle investigator (PI) for the grant. I guess the hospital doesn’t want to take research money brought in by the unwashed and unlearned masses. But there’s yet another exemption that can be applied for that will take a couple of weeks for approval. Fortunately the physician I’m going to be working with is faculty, so he can be the PI instead. I’ll just be the one doing all the work. Maybe I’ll be able to call myself a co-PI. In any case, I don’t think it’ll be a big deal. Sounds like it’s just one of those administrative things. My project, my paper/poster/abstract. First author is what it’s all about.
So now all I need to do is finish up responding to the questions from the sponsoring company, wait for the paperwork to be filled out and hopefully I’ll be able to start this project soon.

At work I have a number of phantoms that I use for various purposes. The techs always know i’m up to something when I roll up with one them. I call them my patients.
There is one set in particular that the techs always give me grief over, the solid and fillable breast attachments that go along with my cardiac phantom. They always get a good laugh when I pull them out to work with. “Playin’ with your boobs again?” and other cracks like that.
All in good fun though I suppose. They are kind of unusual tools to work with.

This week we’re making the final long awaited steps toward going completely filmless in our department. Installation of a CD/DVD burning system to put patient images onto CD/DVD instead of handing patients a stack of films is expected to save the department a ton of money in film supplies and printing costs. It’s something we’ve been able to do before on a limited basis, but it’s always been very labour intensive. The new system is pretty much completely automated and so far is being very well received.
The other step is the conversion to digital in one of the last bastions of film: mammography. Last week we had the first of 4 digital mammography units installed, replacing one of our conventional film/screen units. This week applications training started. From what I’ve heard from the residents, images are great and far superior to regular film/screen. A few snafus with printing and workstation workflow, but probably nothing that won’t be solved with a little bit of training and tweaking. By the end of the year, our mammography department will be completely digital and we’ll finally be almost completely filmless after almost a decade of digital imaging.

Just finished doing the acceptance testing of our new 64 slice CT scanner. This thing will generate a whole bucketload of images without even thinking about it. After two days of playing around, testing and scanning various phantoms, I ended up with a little over 3700 images to send to our PACS. Ended up with some very impressive looking reconstructed images showing a lot more detail in the reformatted coronal and sagittal planes than I expected. It’s a cool machine, but radiologists are going to need new visualization tools to handle all the images these things can spit out.
On another note, the article about blogging I was interviewed for a couple of weeks ago was published today in The State newspaper. It’s a short little fluffy piece with quotes and stuff from a few other webloggers (including me).